Command and Control

Actively manage your assets.

Control the situation instead of it controlling you. Get situational awareness—who, what, where, and when—on a real-time basis anytime and anywhere you need it.

Learn more about why Atlanta Gas Light, Con Edison, Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office and City of San Antonio Police and Fire have purchased Utility’s mobile resource management solutions to increase safety, enhance productivity, reduce fuel costs and improve efficiency. 

Benefits

 

Benefit from practical solutions.

We understand the operational, safety, service, regulatory and financial challenges of managing field-force workers and mobile assets. Utility brings practical and useful solutions to first responders and utilities to help solve these challenges.

Focus on safety.

With real-time situational awareness of field operations, you gain insight into where your personnel and equipment are now, and help them work safely based on the events taking place in the field.

Use crews more effectively.

A fast response is required when an emergency occurs or service goes out. Dispatch better informed crews— faster—to safely handle any type of call, day or night.

Do more with less.

Improve workforce productivity by having the facts about where and when you need crews the most. Be sure you have the right people in the right place at the right time. Have the facts necessary to be accountable for operating efficiently and effectively. Better communications, accurate location reporting, having the right crew and equipment for the job, and more effective routing gets more jobs done per shift, decreases miles driven, reduces outsourced contractor costs, and trims down the need for capital assets. All this quickly adds up to payback in months.

Cut fuel and maintenance costs.

Better location reporting and routing has reduced miles driven by as much as 7 percent. Vehicle diagnostics and engine trouble code reporting helps to identify maintenance issues early and ensure the highest operating efficiency—which can mean significant fuel and maintenance cost reductions.
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Technical Specs

 

Tap into easy-to-manage technology that “just works.”

Utility continually develops products, technology and services that help our customers address mobile resource management in practical, cost-effective ways. Our technology just works—and won’t create additional technical challenges on top of the operations challenges you already face.

 

Command and Control

 

AVaiL is a standard Windows application that provides a comprehensive map-based view of field operations across the entire enterprise. AVaiL provides the same view of field operations whether on a laptop in the vehicle or on a workstation in Central Dispatch with the same performance and response time. AVaiL provides a real-time view of where your assets are now, and where they have been, with overlays of GIS and legacy system operations data. The exact information that any user can see—from just their vehicle to all assets in the enterprise—can be uniquely configured based upon user logon. AVaiL operates on top of Microsoft MapPoint as the map base and is a software subscription service hosted at our Network Operations Center.  

 

Hardware and software requirements for AVaiL are:

  • Intel or AMD single or dual core processor  (not Netbook)
  • 2GB of RAM for Windows 7 / 512MB of RAM for Windows XP
  • Microsoft MapPoint North America 2006 or later
  • 2GB of available disk space for Microsoft MapPoint
  • WiFi or RJ45 100MB Lan broadband connectivity
  • AVaiL is installed using a standard Windows installation program after MS MapPoint is installed on the computer

The hosted part of AVaiL is provided by and managed by Utility at our SAS70 audited high-performance Network Operations Center. Customers do not need to add or manage servers, network equipment, or additional software. As long as the workstation or laptop can connect to the Google homepage, AVaiL just works.

 

DataSync 

 

DataSync provides customer reporting and shares field data with customer legacy systems and third-party data sources. DataSync is a set of standard SQL database tables that are updated every 15 seconds with data from the field and runs on a client Microsoft SQLServer or Oracle database server. 

  • DataSync is updated every 15 seconds with location, diagnostics, and RFID tag data from your entire fleet
  • A set of standard reports is provided as Crystal Reports templates. Customers can edit our standard templates to create any number of additional custom reports

 

Scalability

  • Our solution seamlessly scales with your organization. Twenty vehicles, 200 vehicles, or 2,000 vehicles—all are easily added and displayed with very high performance and reliability anywhere across North America.
  • Customers can choose to share real-time asset location data with their Mutual Aid partners.  Customers have real-time visibility of their own vehicles plus the vehicles of their Mutual Aid partners on a single comprehensive map-based view.

 

Reliability

  • Each AVaiL workstation is a backup for the DataSync multicast repeater. If the DataSync multicast repeater, operating on a customer network fails, AVaiL workstations will automatically promote themselves to perform multicast repeater functions for their network segments. Once the production multicast repeater comes back on line, AVaiL workstations will then automatically demote themselves back to being an AVaiL workstation. Every AVaiL workstation is a high-performance, fault- tolerant backup to the DataSync multicast repeater.
  • The Utility Network Operations Center (NOC) is a high-performance SAS70 certified data center that provides reliable 24 x 7 operations. The Utility NOC has never gone down.
  • The Utility NOC is monitored on a 24 x 7 basis by our separate Utility Health Checker server located at a separate data center in Wisconsin. The Health Checker server continuously checks the performance of our production servers at our Atlanta NOC.  This ensures that any production server or network issues are identified and solved before they can impact your mission-critical operations.

 

 

Security

  • AVaiL requires two-factor security authentication—AVaiL software loaded on the computer plus a valid user ID and password. AVaiL data is tokenized, compressed, and encrypted. WPA2 security with AES encryption can be turned on for all wireless access, further securing the encrypted data. “Over the air” wireless sniffers will not be able to grab any useful information.
  • Data views and access are maintained at the user ID and password level. So the logon credentials determine what data can and cannot be seen by each user. Each user logon can be tailored to determine exactly what data that user can view.
  • The hardened SAS70 certified data center has 24 x 7 physical access control and cyber security, multiple connections to the Internet backbone network, power feeds from two different electric utility substations, and an on-site generator with three days of fuel. Neither of our Network Operations Centers is located in a hurricane, flood, or earthquake vulnerable zone.
  • Data center reliability and access reporting and statistics are continuously monitored by the NOC cybersecurity staff to quickly identify and resolve intrusion attempts and denial of service attacks.

 

 
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